What the Dead Know
Laura Lippman, 2007
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061128868
Summary
Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who—or what—could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness?
Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery.
Where has she been? Why has she waited so long to come forward? Could her abductor truly be a beloved Baltimore cop?
There isn't a shred of evidence to support her story, and every lead she gives the police seems to be another dead end-a dying, incoherent man, a razed house, a missing grave, and a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart not only by the crime but by the fissures the tragedy revealed in what appeared to be the perfect household.
In a story that moves back and forth across the decades, there is only one person who dares to be skeptical of a woman who wants to claim the identity of one Bethany sister without revealing the fate of the other. Will he be able to discover the truth? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio• Birth—January 31, 1959
• Birth—January 31, 1959
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.S., Northwestern University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland
Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a well known and respected writer at the Baltimore Sun, and Madeline Lippman, a retired school librarian for the Baltimore City Public School System. She attended high school in Columbia, Maryland, where she was the captain of the Wilde Lake High School It's Academic team.
Lippman is a former reporter for the (now defunct) San Antonio Light and the Baltimore Sun. She is best known for writing a series of novels set in Baltimore and featuring Tess Monaghan, a reporter (like Lippman herself) turned private investigator.
Lippman's works have won the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero, Gumshoe and Shamus awards. Her 2007 release, What the Dead Know, was the first of her books to make the New York Times bestseller list, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Dagger Award. In addition to the Tess Monaghan novels, Lippman wrote 2003's Every Secret Thing, which has been optioned for the movies by Academy Award–winning actor Frances McDormand.
Lippman lives in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Federal Hill and frequently writes in the neighborhood coffee shop Spoons. In addition to writing, she teaches at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. In January, 2007, she taught at the 3rd Annual Writers in Paradise at Eckerd College.
Lippman is married to David Simon, another former Baltimore Sun reporter, and creator and an executive producer of the HBO series The Wire. The character Bunk is shown to be reading one of her books in episode eight of the first season of The Wire. She appeared in a scene of the first episode of the last season of The Wire as a reporter working in the Baltimore Sun newsroom.
Awards
2015 Anthony Award-Best Novel (After I'm Gone)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Short Story ("Hardly Knew Her")
2008 Barry Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Macavity Award-Best Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2007 Anthony Award-Best Novel (No Good Deeds)
2007 Quill Award-Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2006 Gumshow Award-Best Novel (To the Power of the Three)
2004 Barry Award-Best Novel (Every Secret Thing)
2001 Nero Award (Sugar House)
2000 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
2000 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
1999 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (Butchers Hill)
1998 Agatha Award-Best Novel (Butchers Hill)
1998 Edgar Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
1998 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
What the Dead Know, like the best books in this tradition, is doubly satisfying. You read it once just to move breathlessly toward the finale. Then you revisit it to marvel at how well Ms. Lippman pulled the wool over your eyes.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
As artful as she is at interweaving disarming scenes of two spirited girls on the day they vanished with painful moments in the lives of their parents—maintaining all the while a thread of continuity in the current-day police investigation—Lippman pulls off something more ambitious than a high-wire act of technical virtuosity. With great thought and compassion, she uses her fractured narrative style to delve into the ways in which every serious crime tears to shreds the lives of its victims
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
If you only know her from her Tess Monaghan series, or if you don't know her work at all, read What the Dead Know. It's an all but flawless performance by a writer at the peak of her powers.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post
Emond sounds more than a little like Laura Linney, and her plainspoken, occasionally whispery reading of Lippman's disturbing novel of buried secrets often brings the acclaimed actress to mind. Lippman's novel shuttles back and forth between the present, where a middle-aged woman is involved in a hit-and-run accident, and a past in which two girls are abducted from a mall and never seen again. Do the two events have anything to do with each other? Emond brings a sense of quiet force to Lippman's story, her voice imprinted with sadness and a sense of life's tragic surprises. Her reading bridges the unbridgeable gaps between past and present in Lippman's story, offering little in the way of surprises but a marked amount of suppressed, nearly palpable emotion.
Publishers Weekly
A woman is found disoriented and wandering the street after a hit-and-run accident. Although the accident is not that serious, police are intrigued by the woman's reluctance to provide identification and her claim to be one of a pair of sisters abducted from a shopping mall 30 years earlier. Following her statement, the woman clams up. No bodies were ever found, and many who worked on the missing sisters' case—including the girls' father—are dead or terminally ill. The story moves back and forth through time with suspenseful pacing as the listener gradually begins to understand the terrible consequences of this event. When the girls' mother is finally located, the dramatic suspense is breathtaking and leads to a finale that is completely plausible and satisfying. Linda Emond gives a wonderful performance, using different voices and accents to bring immediacy to the many characters and circumstances. Her pacing adds to the mystery and never leaves the listener in doubt as to the time frame and setting. Anyone who ever questioned why Lippman has won every major crime fiction prize will stop wondering after hearing this wonderful production. Highly recommended for adult and teen collections.
Barbara Valle - Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Laura Lippman withholds a lot of information in the early going of the book. Is that a cheat, or true to the way the characters would have approached the information?
2. Lippman actually used historically accurate details in the book—Escape to Witch Mountain and Chinatown, for example, were the films at that movie theater at that time, and the story about the freak blizzard in '66, the rise of the home answering machine in the 1980s. But do those details add something above and beyond historical accuracy?
3. Who in this book could be described as evil, if anyone? On the morning in March that all these people's destinies collide and interlock—who's really at fault, if anyone?
4. Is Miriam a "bad" woman? Does she see herself as bad and believe that she is being punished for her misdeeds? How does Lippman want us to regard Stan Dunham—as Miriam does, or as Sunny does, or somewhere in-between?
5. What is Kay's role in the book? Is there any significance to the fact that she's reading Jane Eyre?
6. Why are Dave and Miriam so restless in the days before their daughters disappear? What are they wistful for? What do they regret?
7. Dave and Miriam choose very different ways of mourning their daughters. Dave enshrines the memory, choosing to vary almost nothing about his life, while Miriam flees, ultimately choosing to live in a place where no one can possibly know about the tragedy. Is Lippman suggesting that one way of mourning is more valid than the other? Is Dave's misery proof that he's made a mistake, or simply evidence of his own conflicted nature?
8. The five-fold path, which Dave practices, includes self-knowledge as its ultimate goal. Who in What the Dead Know attains self-knowledge? Who never quite gets there? Does self-knowledge necessarily involve change, or can one find peace even in a flawed self?
9. At one point, Nancy Porter notes that "Heather Bethany's" story is least convincing when it's at its most lurid. The ultimate fate of the Bethany girls turns out to be almost banal, a series of mistakes and accidents that led to a tragedy no one planned. Is the fate of the Bethany girls more or less disturbing as a result? Does it seem like something that really could happen?
10. The last line of the first chapter dwells on how freeing it is to say one's name (p. 10). The last line of the book says one's name is the most important word that anyone can ever hear (p. 373). The missing Bethany girl has had a number of names throughout her life and even her mother, Miriam, has availed herself of a slight name change, reverting to her maiden name, which feels like a new name because it's pronounced differently in Spanish. Do names matter so much? Why? How do our names shape our destinies?
11. At the end of the book, Kevin Infante reflects that the missing Bethany girl has always been out in the open, the kind of woman that other people observe, but don't truly see—a student, a store clerk, a support person in the office. What is Lippman trying to say about certain women in our culture? Who is it that we don't see, who fails to register in our day-to-day lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Irma Voth
Miriam Toews, 2011
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062070180
Summary
That rare coming-of-age story able to blend the dark with the uplifting, Irma Voth follows a young Mennonite woman, vulnerable yet wise beyond her years, who carries a terrible family secret with her on a remarkable journey to survival and redemption.
Nineteen-year-old Irma lives in a rural Mennonite community in Mexico. She has already been cast out of her family for marrying a young Mexican ne'er-do-well she barely knows, although she remains close to her rebellious younger sister and yearns for the lost intimacy with her mother. With a husband who proves elusive and often absent, a punishing father, and a faith in God damaged beyond repair, Irma appears trapped in an untenable and desperate situation. When a celebrated Mexican filmmaker and his crew arrive from Mexico City to make a movie about the insular community in which she was raised, Irma is immediately drawn to the outsiders and is soon hired as a translator on the set. But her father, intractable and domineering, is determined to destroy the film and get rid of the interlopers. His action sets Irma on an irrevocable path toward something that feels like freedom.
A novel of great humanity, written with dry wit, edgy humor, and emotional poignancy, Irma Voth is the powerful story of a young woman's quest to discover all that she may become in the unexpectedly rich and confounding world that lies beyond the stifling, observant community she knows. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada
• Education—University of Manitoba; University
of Kings College
• Awards—Governor General's Award, Rogers
Writers Trust Fiction Prize, Writers’ Trust
Engel/Findley Award
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada
Miriam Toews (prounced "Tayvz") is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She moved to Toronto in 2009.
Toews studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King's College in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist. Her non-fiction book Swing Low: A Life was a memoir of her father, a victim of lifelong depression.
Her 2004 novel A Complicated Kindness was her breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Dutch Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads.
A series of letters she wrote in 2000 to the father of her son were published on the website www.openletters.net and were profiled on the radio show This American Life in an episode about missing parents.
In 2007 she made her screen debut in the Mexican film Luz silenciosa directed by Carlos Reygadas, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival. She was nominated for Best Actress at Mexico's Ariel Awards for her performance in the film.
The Flying Troutmans was published in 2008. The novel is about a 28-year-old woman from Manitoba who takes her 15-year-old nephew and 11-year-old niece on a road trip to California after their mentally ill mother has been hospitalized. That novel won the 2008 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2010 she received the prestigious Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Her novel, Irma Voth, came out in 2011. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[F]or all its slow-burn funniness and faith in the redeeming power of art, the novel is built on an awareness that Irma can never fully escape her family's history of pain, suffering and loss…[Toews] writes with an instinctive grasp of the adolescent point of view, in which concepts like personal freedom and self-determination have the highest emotional charge and adults are powerful but slightly irrelevant beings.
Melissa Russo - New York Times Book Review
Miriam Toews has a remarkably light touch. She combines a playfully sardonic humour with crushing pathos.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
In this compelling and beautiful novel, Toews’s quirky and authentic voice shows increasing range and maturity. She is well on her way to fulfilling her promise as an important and serious writer.
Montreal Gazette
A strong and skillful novel…a parable of redemption, a powerful theme…that leaves the reader with a comforting glow of hope.
Annie Proulx - Financial Times
A witty and thoughtful coming-of-age story…a novel about parenthood and sisterhood, and about redefining those relationships as people grow…it succeeds tremendously.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Toews…combines an intimate coming-of-age tale with picaresque and extremely effective prose.
Publishers Weekly
A literary novel marked by charm, wit and an original approach to language.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Who is Irma Voth? What is she like when the novel opens? Is she the same person by the book’s end? What changes about her—and what does not?
2. What are your impressions of her family? What is her role among the Voths? What are the dynamics like between Irma, her parents, and her siblings? Do you like her parents? Can you understand their choices?
3. Irma has been raised in a strict Mennonite community. Is religion important to Irma? Does she believe in the same God her father does? How has it shaped her character?
4. How would you describe her marriage? Why did she marry Jorge—and why did he marry her? Was it love?
5. Early in the story, Irma poses a question to herself. “How do I behave in this world without following the directions of my father, my husband, or God?” How would you answer Irma? How might she answer this question herself by the novel’s end?
6. What does the film crew’s arrival hold for Irma and her family? How does meeting Diego, Marijke, Wilson affect the young woman?
7. Diego talks to Irma about rebellion, and asks her a question. “Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?” What would your response to Diego be? What are they all rebelling against?
8. Why does Diego suggest Irma keep a diary of her experiences on the shoot? What does she write about? What wisdom does her writing offer her and how does that wisdom affect her choices?
9. Marijke introduces Irma to Epicurus’s “four-part cure”—Don’t fear God. Don’t worry about death. What is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure.” Is this a good philosophy to live by? Does it illuminate Irma’s struggle? How do events in her lrma’s life address all four tenets? Use examples from the story to illustrate your points.
10. What draws Irma to Wilson? She asks him to ponder a question. “if you knew this was your last day on earth what kind of story would you write?” By the end, Irma has her own answer. Explain her ultimate response, and how she came to it. What would your answer be?
11. What adjectives would you use to describe Irma? What about Aggie? Irma calls her baby sister Ximena, “honest.” Why? Can a baby be honest? Is Irma honest? What about Aggie and the rest of the people in Irma’s life?
12. When they arrive in Mexico City, Aggie discovers a Diego Rivera mural. How does the mural affect Aggie? What about Irma? How does Rivera’s message reflect the girls’ experience?
13. What role does art play in Irma’s life? Her father says, “Art is a lie.” Why? Wilson tells her that art, “comes from the same desire to live.” Later, in Mexico City, Hubertus joyfully tells Irma, “When life is a shit storm your best umbrella is art.” Analyze each of these men’s viewpoints. What do their opinions tell us about their characters? What does Irma think about art? How would she define it? Is art necessary for life—even if it is a lie? Does it shelter us from life’s vicissitudes? How? What would life be like without art?
14. A jacaranda tree saved Natalie from despair and suicide. What, in your opinion, saved Irma?
15. Was Irma right to feel guilty about what happened in Canada? Could she have known the outcome of her actions? How did her knowledge of the truth and her role transform her relationship with her father? Does Irma’s revelation influence your opinion of her?
16. At its heart, Irma Voth is the story of young woman discovering herself and finding meaning in her life. It touches on many themes—defiance, freedom, independence, beauty, sacrifice, guilt, family, art, God, forgiveness, love. Choose one or two and trace them through the course of the story, using examples from Irma’s life and those around her.
17. Towards the end of the novel, Irma sees Diego’s film. How does she feel watching it? Can she ever forgive herself for all that has passed? Do you think she will ever be reconciled with the family she left behind?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679744665
Summary
Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 19, 1947
• Where—Bombay, Maharashtra, India
• Education—M.A., King's College, Cambridge, UK
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1981 (named the best novel to win
the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years in 1993);
Whitbread Prize, 1988 and 1995
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989.
Rushdie was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at the Emory University and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy.
Career
Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he came up with "irresistibubble" for Aero and "Naughty but Nice" for cream cakes, and for the agency Ayer Barker, for whom he wrote the memorable line "That'll do nicely" for American Express. It was while he was at Ogilvy that he wrote Midnight's Children, before becoming a full-time writer. John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty has criticised Rushdie for not referring to his copywriting past frequently enough, although conceding: "He did write crap ads...admittedly."
His first novel, Grimus, a part-science fiction tale, was generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability. This work won the 1981 Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received the prize during its first 25 and 40 years. Midnight's Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem Sinai has been compared to Rushdie. However, the author has refuted the idea of having written any of his characters as autobiographical, stating...
People assume that because certain things in the character are drawn from your own experience, it just becomes you. In that sense, I’ve never felt that I’ve written an autobiographical character.
After Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame, in which he depicts the political turmoil in Pakistan, basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Indian diaspora.
Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called The Jaguar Smile. This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments.
His most controversial work, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see below). Rushdie has published many short stories, including those collected in East, West (1994). The Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history was published in 1995. The Ground Beneath Her Feet presents an alternative history of modern rock music. The song of the same name by U2 is one of many song lyrics included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the lyricist. He also wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990.
Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in Britain, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In his 2002 non-fiction collection Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter and praised her highly in the foreword for her collection Burning your Boats.
His latest novel is Luka and the Fire of Life, published in November 2010. Earlier in the same year, he announced that he was writing his memoirs, entitled Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which was published in September 2012.
In 2012, Salman Rushdie became one of the first major authors to embrace Booktrack (a company that synchronises ebooks with customised soundtracks) when he published his short story "In the South" on the platform.
Other Activities
Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian) writers, influenced an entire generation of Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential writer in postcolonial literature in general. He has received many plaudits for his writings, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and many of literature's highest honours. Rushdie was the President of PEN American Center from 2004 to 2006 and founder of the PEN World Voices Festival.
He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers.
In 2007 he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has also deposited his archives.
In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances).
Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film Bridget Jones's Diary based on the book of the same name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On May 12, 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film, Water, faced violent protests. He appears in the role of Helen Hunt's obstetrician-gynecologist in the film adaptation of Elinor Lipman's novel Then She Found Me. In September 2008, and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panellist on the HBO program Real Time with Bill Maher.
Rushdie is currently collaborating on the screenplay for the cinematic adaptation of his novel Midnight's Children with director Deepa Mehta. The film will be released in October, 2012.
Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund, a non-profit organisation which provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group representing the interests of atheistic and humanistic Americans in Washington, D.C. In November 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new liberal arts college that has adopted as its motto a Latin translation of a phrase ("free speech is life itself") from an address he gave at Columbia University in 1991 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The Satanic Verses and the fatwa
The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic" verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities.
On February 14, 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam." A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On March 7, 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.
The publication of the book and the fatwa sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked and even killed.
On September 24, 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie."
Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the death sentence. In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid. Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwa on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it, and the person who issued it – Ayatollah Khomeini – has been dead since 1989.
Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat."
A memoir of his years of hiding, Joseph Anton, was published in 2012. Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias.
In 2012, following uprisings over an anonymously posted YouTube video denigrating Muslims, a semi-official religious foundation in Iran increased the reward it had offered for the killing of Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million dollars. Their stated reason: "If the [1989] fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have continued would have not happened."
Knighthood
Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on June 16, 2007. He remarked, "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim majorities protested. Several called publicly for his death. Some non-Muslims expressed disappointment at Rushdie's knighthood, claiming that the writer did not merit such an honour and there were several other writers who deserved the knighthood more than Rushdie.
Al-Qaeda has condemned the Rushdie honour. The Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that Britain's award for Indian-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response."
Religious Beliefs
Rushdie came from a Muslim family though he is an atheist now. In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending".
Personal Life
Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar (born 1980). His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan (born 1999). In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and model Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on July 2, 2007, with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage.
In 1999 Rushdie had an operation to correct ptosis, a tendon condition that causes drooping eyelids and that, according to him, was making it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have been able to open my eyes at all," he said.
Since 2000, Rushdie has "lived mostly near Union Square" in New York City. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
I was raised neither a Catholic nor a Jew. I was both and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was—what's the word these days? atomized. Yessir: a real Bombay mix." So says Moraes Zogioby, known as Moor, the narrator of The Moor's Last Sigh. Salman Rushdie's first novel in seven years is his best work since 1980's brilliant Midnight's Children. Moor, who has a disorder that causes him to age at twice the normal speed, is the last surviving member of a crazy clan of wealthy South Indian spice merchants. He tells their insane, incestuous, violent domestic saga, which spans four generations. It centers on his beautiful mother, Aurora da Gama, a stubborn, passionate, Christian artist who, at 15, falls in love with the handsome Abraham Zogioby, a penniless, 35-year-old Jewish employee of her family. They marry and have four children: Ina, Minnie, Mynah and Moor. Betrayal, murder, and mayhem ensue.
Rushdie, the author of nine previous books—including The Satanic Verses, which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue his death sentence in 1989—alludes often to his own exile, the story of modern India and the dangers of art. At first the hyperbole, didactic asides, verbal puns, lyrical and lewd jokes, and slapstick routines seem a bit much, but if you stick with it, a cumulative magic takes hold. Rushdie's satiric, hysterically funny, political family tragedy is a masterpiece.
Susan Shapiro - Salon
This novel, looked at as a work of literary art, is a triumph, an intricate and deceptive one.... The grand deception in this book is to conceal a bitter cautionary tale within bright, carnivalesque wrappings.
Norman Rush - New York Times
The most complete and gratifying work to emerge from Salman Rushdie's imagination.... The Moor's Last Sigh is an exotic story, in its setting, in its characters, in its punning extravagance, and in its deeply human core. It is an extraordinary family saga...full of wonderful characters, and the insight born of genuine reflection.... A remarkable spell of creativity.
Edmonton Journal
One of the most wonderful works of political art I have encountered, a novel to rival Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, or Dante's Divine Comedy.... The Moor's Last Sigh is one of the most admirable novels I've ever read.
Ottawa Citizen
Moraes Zogoiby, the product of a mixed marriage, is a self-described "cathjew nut" living in the multicultural stewpot of Bombay. His freethinking mother, Aurora, heiress to a vast spice trade fortune and reputedly a descendant of Vasco da Gama, decorates his nursery with murals featuring American cartoon characters instead of the traditional Hindu deities. Young Moraes's cultural identity is so confused that his favorite Indian is Tonto, from The Lone Ranger. Aurora is also a renowned artist, and the book's title refers to her masterpiece, which has been stolen by a rival and smuggled out of the country. Moraes's frantic search for the painting is complicated by the fact that he ages at twice the normal speed and is quickly running out of time. This rich and very readable novel is filled with playful allusions to postwar Indian history, world literature, pop culture, and Rushdie's own recent travails. On a par with the marvelous Midnight's Children, this is Rushdie's best work in years. —Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Rushdie use the device of a "double-quick" [p. 143] life for the Moor? What does the idea of such speed add to the novel? What is the significance of the Moor's deformed right hand to his character and function within the story?
2. Rushdie has stated that the idea of a portrait of a mother painted over because the father did not like it—the "lost image"—was the original inspiration for this novel. The image of the "palimpsest, " a painting over which a second work has been superimposed, is central to The Moor's Last Sigh. How does the palimpsest become a metaphor for other of the novel's themes, i. e., love, God, the cultures of India?
3. Would you call Aurora a "good" mother? How directly is she responsible for the tragic lives of Ina, Minnie, Mynah, and the Moor? Why did Vasco Miranda paint Aurora without her children, and how does that image correspond with the picture of India painted by Rushdie?
4. Aurora's role as a mother is clearly central, but what about her role as wife and lover? What strategies does she use to deal with the men in her life, in particular Abraham, Vasco, and Raman Fielding? What do the notions of love, fidelity, and infidelity mean to her?
5. "Motherness—excuse me if I underline the point—is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet" [p. 137]. In India, the mother is traditionally associated with the idea of the nation. How does Rushdie use the mythology of the mother goddess to depict his country? How did Indira Gandhi use it to propagandize her own national role, and what do you infer Rushdie's opinion of such mythmaking to be? How is Auroramade to represent the Indian nation itself in its maternal role?
6. What do the key historical events referred to by the narrator—the Spanish reconquista of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors, the founding of the spice trade between Europe and India, Portuguese colonial expansion, political events of twentieth-century India—have to do with the story of the Zogoiby and da Gama families? How do these references contribute to the story's impact?
7. "The family in the novel reflects a truth about Bombay society in the past thirty or so years, " Rushdie has said. "Which is that the rich have got very much richer and the poor very much poorer." How is this economic disparity dealt with in the novel? How do the changing fortunes of the da Gama-Zogoiby clan reflect the economic condition of India? Can you find parallels with the changes that have taken place in American society over the past twenty years?
8. Do you think that Rushdie's elegiac representation of Bombay owes something to his exile from his native city? Where else in the novel does the theme of exile arise? Which characters might be considered, at one time or another, exiles?
9. How does Rushdie depict Hinduism? How does Raman Fielding's Mumbai Axis distort the tenets of Hinduism [pp. 296-301], and to what purpose? Is his political/cultural agenda pure fascism, and how closely does it resemble the most famous fascist regime of the century, Adolf Hitler's? Are the Moor's reasons for joining Fielding convincing to you? Does Rushdie imply that religious fundamentalism is essentially inimical to democracy? Do you believe that Rushdie implies a link between religion and madness? Between religion and disease?
10. Rushdie has given his characters names that are resonant within Portuguese, Spanish, Jewish, and Indian culture: Abraham, Carmen, Camoens, da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, Isabella, Vasco, Adam Braganza, Castile, etc. What significance does each name carry within the narrative and within the thematic structure Rushdie has given his novel?
11. Over and over Rushdie stresses, through his narrator the Moor, the beauty of plurality. Speaking of his family's history, the Moor asks, "Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crownsÉcan this really be India?" [p. 87]. How does the narrator represent, in his own person, India's pluralism and the pluralism of the entire world? How does the golden age of Granada, as imagined by Aurora in her paintings, comment upon the Zogoibys' story and the political history of the late twentieth century? Is Aurora's vision confirmed or denied by the novel's events?
12. How do the changes and developments in Aurora's painting style comment upon the nature and function of the artist? What about her evolving subject matter—how does it reflect the events within her family, and the larger events occurring in the nation and the world? How does Vasco Miranda's second-rate, kitsch art contradict, or compliment, Aurora's vision?
13. Uma Sarasvati's is presented by the author and by Aurora herself as a foil to Aurora. Does her character—and the more theoretical, "post-modern" nature of her art [pp. 261-2]—function as the opposite of Aurora's, or as its compliment? Does Uma exist as a character in her own right, or purely as an incarnation of evil? Is Abraham, too, an incarnation of evil?
14. What does Rushdie imply about the position and role of women through female characters such as Aurora, Belle, Uma, Carmen, and Nadia Wadia, and what, if anything, do these women have in common? How do they use the force of their characters to redress any cultural disadvantages they might have as women? How might one describe Rushdie's vision of the balance between the sexes?
15. In his opening pages, the Moor presents himself as a variation on Dante, "without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life" [p. 4], and the structure of the book is guided in part by that of The Divine Comedy. What other works of literature—fairy tales, religious texts, mythologies, epics, plays—help to give The Moor's Last Sigh its shape? How do their themes contribute to and enrich Rushdie's own?
16. How does Rushdie use the Benengeli section of the novel to explore the theme of parasitism, and do you think that he intends Benengeli to represent the parasitism of the modern world? Rushdie equates Vasco Miranda with Bram Stoker's Dracula; with Helsing, the Larios sisters, and the Benengeli Parasites he makes other references to the Dracula tale. What does he achieve by making this comparison? What does the presence of Aoi U' within Vasco's nightmarish castle signify?
17. The Moor's Last Sigh can be seen as an argument for tolerance over dogmatism, educated scepticism over intractible zeal. How does Rushdie's imagined ideal of "Mooristan" encapsulate this interpretation? Do you believe that the novel delivers a message of pessimism or of optimism?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
The Witches of Eastwick
John Updike, 1984
Random House
306 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449912102
In Brief
Before they were the widows of Eastwick, our heroines were a trio of delightfully wicked witches.
In a small New England town in that hectic era when the sixties turned into the seventies, there lived three witches. Alexandra Spoffard, a sculptress, could create thunderstorms. Jane Smart, a cellist, could fly. The local gossip columnist, Sukie Rougemont, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, the wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose strobe-lit hot tub room became the scene of satanic pleasures. (From the publisher.)
The 1987 film version starred Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jack Nicholson.
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About the Author
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
1990
With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.
In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.
Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.
Although autobiographical elements appear in the Rabbit books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.
Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.
• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.
• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
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Critics Say . . .
(Pre-internet books have few indepth mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
The premise of The Witches of Eastwick is all in fun. But serious fun. Because even if the witches aren't responsible for what's gone wrong with small-town contemporary New England culture, they offer Mr. Updike a metaphor with which he has brought that culture wittily and radiantly to life.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
A great deal of fun to read...fresh, constantly entertaining...John Updike [is] a wizard of language and observation.
Philadelphia Inquirer
A wicked entertainment.... In book after book, Updike’s fine, funny impressionistic art strips the full casings of everyday-ness from objects we have known all our lives and makes them shine with fresh new connections.
New Republic
Witty, ironic, engrossing, punctuated by transports of spectacular prose. [Selected as one of Time's Five Best Works of Fiction of the Year.]
Time
Sexual freedom, as sexually explicit in its language...as direct in its sexual reporting, as abundant in its sexual activities.
Atlantic Monthly
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Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Witches of Eastwick:
1. Why witches? As a metaphor, what do they represent? Here's a hint from one critic:
The whole brew is several times offered as a metaphor for the evil unloosed in America in the 1960's. (New York Times' Lehmann-Haupt).
To what particular evils—and to whom—is he referring? (The last name is a clever tip-off.)
2. Talk about the way in which Updike interweaves the past with the present—an attempt to shed light on a particularly brutal past in the nation's history. How do events of past and present relate to one another?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Ender's Game (Ender Wiggin Series #1)
Orson Scott Card, 1985
Tom Doherty Assoc. (Tor Science Fiction)
352pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812550702
Summary
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.
Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.
Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 24, 1951
• Where—Richland, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., Brigham Young University; M.A.,
University of Utah
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Greensboro, North Carolina
Any discussion of Orson Scott Card's work must necessarily begin with religion. A devout Mormon, Card believes in imparting moral lessons through his fiction, a stance that sometimes creates controversy on both sides of the fence. Some Mormons have objected to the violence in his books as being antithetical to the Mormon message, while his conservative political activism has gotten him into hot water with liberal readers.
Whether you agree with his personal views or not, Card's fiction can be enjoyed on many different levels. And with the amount of work he's produced, there is something to fit the tastes of readers of all ages and stripes. Averaging two novels a year since 1979, Card has also managed to find the time to write hundreds of audio plays and short stories, several stage plays, a television series concept, and a screenplay of his classic novel Ender's Game. In addition to his science fiction and fantasy novels, he has also written contemporary fiction, religious, and nonfiction works.
Card's novel that has arguably had the biggest impact is 1985's Hugo and Nebula award-winner Ender's Game. Ender's Game introduced readers to Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a young genius faced with the task of saving the Earth. Ender's Game is that rare work of fiction that strikes a chord with adults and young adult readers alike. The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, also won the Hugo and Nebula awards, making Card the only author in history to win both prestigious science-fiction awards two years in a row.
In 2000, Card returned to Ender's world with a "parallel" novel called Ender's Shadow. Ender's Shadow retells the events of Ender's Game from the perspective of Julian "Bean" Delphinki, Ender's second-in-command. As Sam to Ender's Frodo, Bean is doomed to be remembered as an also-ran next to the legendary protagonist of the earlier novel. In many ways, Bean is a more complex and intriguing character than the preternaturally brilliant Ender, and his alternate take on the events of Ender's Game provide an intriguing counterpoint to fans of the original series.
In addition to moral issues, a strong sense of family pervades Card's work. Card is a devoted family man and father to five (!) children. In the age of dysfunctional family literature, Card bristles at the suggestion that a positive home life is uninteresting. "How do you keep good parents' from being boring?" he once said. "Well, in truth, the real problem is, how do you keep bad parents from being boring? I've seen the same bad parents in so many books and movies that I'm tired of them."
Critical appreciation for Card's work often points to the intriguing plotlines and deft characterizations that are on display in Card's most accomplished novels. Card developed the ability to write believable characters and page-turning plots as a college theater student. To this day, when he writes, Card always thinks of the audience first. "It's the best training in the world for a writer, to have a live audience," he says. "I'm constantly shaping the story so the audience will know why they should care about what's going on."
Card brought Bean back in 2005 for the fourth and final novel in the Shadow series: Shadow of the Giant. The novel presented some difficulty for the writer. Characters who were relatively unimportant when the series began had moved to the forefront, and as a result, Card knew that the ending he had originally envisioned would not be enough to satisfy the series' fans.
Although the Ender and Shadow series deal with politics, Card likes to keep his personal political opinions out of his fiction. He tries to present the governments of futuristic Earth as realistically as possible without drawing direct analogies to our current political climate. This distance that Card maintains between the real world and his fictional worlds helps give his novels a lasting and universal appeal.
Extras
• Card has won numerous awards, including four Hugo Awards; four Locus Awards; two Nebula Awards; two Hamilton-Brackett Memorial Awards; World Fantasy Award; John W. Campbell Award (World Science Fiction Convention); Mythopoeic Society Award; Margaret A. Edwards Award (Young Adult Library Services Assn.); Whitney Award.
• When asked in a Barnes & Noble interview what book most influenced his life or his career as a writer, here is what he said:
The Book of Mormon. Mark Twain was wrong. It isn't chloroform in print. But, like most books, it can't survive a hostile reading. My reading as a child was not hostile. I found the stories gripping and morally challenging. Though I was not conscious of the influence as I started writing, in retrospect the motifs and stylistic quirks I picked up from the Book of Mormon are obvious. I'd like to think it has influenced my life a great deal more than it has influenced my writing. (Author bio and interview adapted from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Audio version.) For the 20th anniversary of Card's Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel, Audio Renaissance brings to life the story of child genius Ender Wiggin, who must save the world from malevolent alien "buggers." In his afterword, Card declares, "The ideal presentation of any book of mine is to have excellent actors perform it in audio-only format," and he gets his wish. Much of the story is internal dialogue, and each narrator reads the sections told from the point of view of a particular character, rather than taking on a part as if it were a play. Card's phenomenal emotional depth comes through in the quiet, carefully paced speech of each performer. No narrator tries overmuch to create separate character voices, though each is clearly discernible, and the understated delivery will draw in listeners. In particular, Rudnicki, with his lulling, sonorous voice, does a fine job articulating Ender's inner struggle between the kind, peaceful boy he wants to be and the savage, violent actions he is frequently forced to take. This is a wonderful way to experience Card's best-known and most celebrated work, both for longtime fans and for newcomers.
Publishers Weekly
(Audio version; Grade 7 & up.) The novel asks: What does it take to successfully lead men into battle? The buggers have invaded Earth twice. The last time mankind survived only because of the brilliance of Mazer Rackham, commander of the International Fleet. Years later, a third invasion is feared and a new commander is sought. Ender Wiggin is only six years old when he is plucked to succeed Rackham and sent to the space station Battle School. He is isolated, ridiculed, bullied, and persecuted-but he survives and thrives. Using his astonishing intelligence, the boy learns to be a top-notch solider and, despite his youth and small stature, is quickly promoted up the ranks. By the age of 12, Ender learns the art of command and earns the respect and fear of his fellow soldiers. This audio version was created in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the novel and it's a gem. The audiobook is narrated by a full cast. Stefan Rudniki is particularly good as Ender. Despite Ender's age, this is not a children's novel. Its profound themes (and mild profanity) call for intelligent teens who appreciate a complex novel. —Tricia Melgaard, Centennial Middle School, Broken Arrow, OK
School Library Journal
Ender is portrayed as just a pawn in the larger game..., and readers will alternately sympathize with his exploitation and cheer when he is able to make friends in spite of the tremendous forces working to isolate and dehumanize him. The political and philosophical material at the novel's end may get too heavy for some readers, but for the most part, this novel will deservedly reach a new generation through this new edition.
Noral Piehl - Children's Literature
Card has taken the venerable sf concepts of a superman and interstellar war against aliens, and, with superb characterization, pacing and language, combined them into a seamless story of compelling power. This is Card at the height of his very considerable powers—a major sf novel by any reasonable standards.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Is childhood a right? Does a person robbed of a "normal" childhood have any possibility of stability as an adult? Does Ender have any chance of living "happily ever after"?
2. The Buggers communicate telepathically using no identifiable external means of communication. Was it inevitable that war would have to occur when two sentient species met but were unable to communicate?
3. Card has stated that "children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves." Does Ender's Game prove or disprove this opinion?
4. The government in Ender's world plays a huge role in reproductive decisions, imposing financial penalties and social stigma on families who have more than two children but exerting pressure on specific families who show great generic potential to have a "third" like Ender. Is government ever justified in involving itself in family planning decisions? Why or why not?
5. Is genocide, or in the case of Ender's Game where an entire alien race is annihilated, xenocide, ever justified? Was the xenocide of the buggers inevitable?
6. Ender's Game has often been cited as a good book to read by readers who are not fans of science fiction. Why does it appeal to both fans of science fiction and those who do not usually read science fiction?
7. Peter appears to be the personification of evil, but as Locke, acts as a good person. How does Card treat the concept of good versus evil in Ender's Game?
8. In their thoughts, speech, and actions Card describes children in terms not usually attributed to children. In the introduction to Ender's Game he states that he never felt like a child. "I felt like a person all along—the same person that I am today. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than an adult's emotions and desires." Do contemporary teens feel this same way? Do only gifted children feel this way or is it a universal feeling?
(Questions from the author's website.)